Closing public blog access

Dear readers (if there are any of you, haha. I admit I made this blog mostly so I could keep track of things myself), I will be closing public access to this blog.

Unfortunately, a piece of my ARCHDRC 202 work was stolen off my blog last semester and used by another student in their portfolio. Therefore, I sadly need to close this blog to most users. As much as I love seeing what gets looked at the most, and getting feedback every now and then, it is not worth the risk of having my work plagiarised.

Anyway, to the point of this post: if you are interested in continuing to see my posts, you need to send me your email address. Then I can save your email address in the settings here, which will allow you access. You can send me your email address either in a comment on this post (if you are comfortable posting such a thing on the internet... although it's true that once I close public access to the blog only other authorised blog readers will be able to see the comments) or in a message on my facebook page. I'm afraid, that since I don't want to risk this happening again, I will be limiting blog access to people I personally know (not including the other student who took my work, obviously haha). But I doubt that many strangers look at this anyway :P (Although sometimes I'm very surprised by the page views! O.o)

So, how long do you have to request access? Well, actually forever... once it is closed blogger will still give you the option to request access. However, I will be leaving the blog open for now so this post can be seen. Since I am currently on an exchange in Germany (oh yes... had this not happened I would have already written a post about this, I guess I will get to that later!), I don't actually start university until October 1st, so it's unlikely I'll want to post any work until then. Therefore the blog will remain publicly open until then, and you can comment on this blogpost until then (although obviously you can send me a message on facebook after then too! :P)

I hope you are all well, and viele grüße aus Deutschland :)

Architektia Logo

Firstly, I made it to second year! Yay! That means I'm just over 1/3rd of the way through my BAS now. Anyway, I don't have much time to write since I have A LOT of work to do... but since one part of my work is, of course, presenting things (on an A0 sheet, gasp... so huge! We seem to work on bigger paper every year! To think I used to think A3 was big...) I decided I should make myself a logo, since of course I can no longer use the Studio L.I.M. one since I am no longer working with Manu and Andy. Therefore I spent a few minutes fiddling around on Illustrator (which I am getting better at... but I am still terrified of it and run back into Photoshop's arms whenever I can...) and came up with this. My initials are highlighted, this blog is advertised, and I can easily change the colour depending on the overall colour scheme of whatever I am working on so I'm pretty happy with it. The only thing that is frustrating me a little right now is the fact that the eye (or at least my eye...) immediately jumps to the second 'i' (the eye jumps to the i... hahaha... yeah, it's past midnight and I'm exhausted). I guess that's just because your brain registers SUDDEN NEGATIVE SPACE since I'm pretty sure I got the spacing between the letters right... well anyway, it will do. Clearly, I'm only a perfectionist to the point of laziness!

In other news, I'm really looking forward to Design 3. We got to pick our studio topics this year, something I was really excited about! I got my first choice too- Dermott McMeel and George Dodd's paper on High Density Architecture, Acoustics, and expressions of Citizenry. I really enjoyed our first studio- we visited the Acoustics Centre and got to enter the Reverberation Chamber and the Anechoic Room! They were both incredible to experience, but especially the latter... it is -12 decibels inside, and at the time it was built, was the quietest room in the world. I found it slightly uncomfortable... when I first entered I felt pressure in my ears as if I were descending on a plane, and once the lights were switched off all I could feel was the pressure of my feet on the ground... since I had been left with only 3 senses. Such an amazing and interesting experience!

Advice for new first years

I've recently been in touch with a few new first years wanting to know about architecture, so I thought I'd create this post and update it whenever I think of something that last year me would have liked to know about architecture.

1) You will be totally confused when you first get into studio, but it will all come together in the end. Just keep working- ALWAYS PRODUCE. Even if you have no idea what you are doing or where you are headed with your design, just keep drawing, making models, whatever... in the end something will come of it.

2) 3 things that are pretty useful to have on you at all times are:
i) A craft knife: forgetting this when you go to studio is terrible, since you will be making models like all the time. It is also handy at home, and it makes you feel safer if you have it close to you when you're walking home from uni at 11pm through the dark streets of Auckland... haha...
ii) Plasters: these are necessary because of item number one, haha... no but seriously, I cut myself sooo many times this year. To be fair model making is definitely something I need to improve on, but the probabilities of you cutting yourself are fairly high and you don't want to be bleeding all over your work when you do.
iii) A sketch pad: you never know when inspiration will strike. Also, I find I like to draw when I explain things to people, so it's annoying when I don't have it.

3) Before buying textbooks, check the library. Our required textbook for ARCHTECH 106 last year was available as an ebook, which saved me cash (which I could then go spend at Gordon Harris, our continual money sucker, hahaha...). You may also be able to get textbooks cheaper elsewhere than UBS, so check online etc. 'Cause baby, you will need moolah.

4) It is never to early to start learning software. If you are a future first year and you are reading this check out my post about ArchiCAD here Starting ArchiCAD it provides you with links for getting a free licence and for training videos.

5) Speaking of software, you will be using A LOT of software, but learning Adobe Illustrator will be very useful since it is vector based (and therefore preferred) as well as Adobe InDesign since you will be printing many, many things and it is good for layout generally. If you can, take a look at Rhinoceros3D and Grasshopper all well, we use those too (you may already know things like Google SketchUp, but some of the tutors hate it... so be wary of using it, although I personally find it useful sometimes...)

The Psychology of Colours

I'm not really sure what label to put this under since I am currently on holiday and hence not in any particular class... well anyway, I just found this interesting:
http://thumbnails.visually.netdna-cdn.com/the-psychology-of-colors_504dc89d06de9.jpg
I've already learnt a bit about colour psychology, way back in primary school! I was picked to be part of a students that worked with an engineer each week to design a desk. (So you see I've been designing since I was a kid, definitely a passion!) It was really fun, although the class ended up just stopping for some reason (such a shame, we had all these epic field trips planned to factories and things... I guess the teachers thought it was too much for wee kiddies).